Number 1437: Orlando issue

I thought Amazing World of DC Comics, DC’s in-house fanzine, was a fine product. It featured not only an insider look at the operations of a comic book publisher, but sometimes unpublished stories from the DC inventory.

The “Special Joe Orlando Issue” spotlighted artist/editor Orlando. He edited some of the mystery comics, and the humor comic, Plop! The issue has an unpublished story from Plop!, written by Mad-regular Don Edwing and drawn by Dave Manak. There is also the story, originally from EC’s Weird Fantasy #18 (1953), drawn by Joe, “Judgment Day.” It was one of EC’s “preachies,” as EC publisher Bill Gaines called them, stories that featured social issues. In this case it is racial segregation. The story loses some of its punch with black line printing, since the idea is the robots are blue and orange.

Then, as now, DC and Mad were owned by the same company, so seeing an EC story in a DC-published fanzine wasn’t so surprising.

An interview with Orlando was headed by this vintage  “Artist of the Issue” photo from EC Comics.

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Number 1303: More Wild West Woody

I promised this to reader Darci back in November. It's another of the Western tales Wally Wood did for Western Crime Busters. This is from issue #9 (1952). It's the first of two stories he did for that issue. Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. attributes the art on “Tex Gordon” to Wood and Joe Orlando.

Schoolmarm Kathy Butte (who is a beaut, all right), dresses provocatively for the time. Wood and Orlando miss no opportunity to have her show some leg, even when nobody's looking (page 4 panel 5). Tex is a fast worker. He admits it. When Kathy asks, "Who’s the fastest, Tex?” He says he is, then demonstrates. Between the next to last panel and the last he’s got Kathy’s dress down off her shoulder and is moving in for more. Yeeeee-haw!

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Number 1206: Captain Science and the Flower of Death!

I showed “The Flower of Death,” a few years ago. I’m re-presenting it with new scans. What I said about it then was that it was a story I chased for years without knowing what it was. I’d seen it when I was very young, maybe six-years-old, at a friend’s house. Despite being surrounded by two very cool Wood and Orlando Captain Science stories, what I remembered about the comic book was the transition of flower to ape. People write me sometimes and ask if I can help them identify a story they remember, and without fail I can't. I can't even help myself. This was a story stuck in my memory for many years that I couldn't find, and then one day opened up Captain Science #5 and there it was. Eureka!

Except...it's not much of a story. Artwork is serviceable, credited by the Grand Comics Database in their question mark fashion as being by Bill Fraccio? and Vince Napoli? So they're not sure. I wondered about the clumsy transition panels (which look like photostats), flower to ape and ape to flower, and then I found the origin of it in a gasoline ad from a 1950 issue of Life. This is another of my discoveries in Life that later turned up in comic books.

I've also included a Captain Science story from the issue because I love this Joe Orlando-Wally Wood science fiction and so do you. These are my scans from the original comic, but the story is also included in the book Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction, edited by J. David Spurlock. It's a trade paperback available from Amazon.com, among other bookselling sites, and if you're fortunate, at your favorite local comic book shop.

From Captain Science #5, 1951:

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